Dream Journal #11
01/20/2016 05:26 p.m.
I'm out of town, somewhere where the maps are confused and I haven't packed the right clothes. There are people partying at our cabin but I don't remember how to get there. So I dress in something inappropriate and very unstylish then hit the road. Someone might be traveling with me. It might be my Dad. The roads pass by but I see them as if they are written on a map. We're in a small city. The weather is beautiful, early summer. We're walking up hills in a residential neighborhood full of trees, knocking on doors, raising money. Downtown, they have our cabin and it's been disassembled for the purpose of cleaning and restoring its timbers. The stacked wood has a beautiful golden hue to it. There seems to be a restriction on when it can be reassembled. We don't know what town this is. I don't know for sure that I'm not alone.

I'm in a huge, sun-filled church with stadium seating. We're singing a song but I don't know the words. I'm trying to find my seat, unsuccessfully. It seems like I just keep climbing stairs, wading through the crowd of worshippers. But then I find myself in a line outside the sanctuary. It's Spring. We're singing a processional hymn, dressed in robes. But the robes are slipping off, beyond our control. We're in our underwear. The panties on the middle-aged woman in front of me are riding very low. I feel embarrassed for her. She pulls them back up.

The service is over and I'm in a gray waiting room. Over in the corner, beneath the stairs, are some bicycles. A very special children's bike, that I had purchased myself, is missing. I go beneath the stairs and take a closer look; it's definitely missing. Going outside, I see a kid riding the bike and approach him. It's the same kid for whom I had bought the bike. The sun is shining and everything--the sidewalk, the walls of the building, even the air--seems to glimmer.

I'm back home, but I'm not sure what or where this home is. Except I do know--simultaneously, it's my house in Minneapolis, my old house in the suburbs, and it's located in each of those neighborhoods as well as my even older neighborhood in Sioux Falls. The maps of these places are overlain. There's snow everywhere. Rather than shovel the snow, I take a walk down the street--three blocks down, then one block over to my right. I see an apartment building across the street to the north. It's the building in which my long-dead grandmother once lived, but it is on the site of a church where, as a young adult, I once had been a parishioner. In the very window that had been my grandmother's, I see my son's old piano teacher, Nelda Hart. It appears that she's having a party.

I'm inside the apartment, but no one else is there now. I'm supposed to make coffee, but the large coffee pot is way up on top of a cupboard in the corner of the kitchen. I have to climb a ladder to reach it. Once I've filled the basket with coffee, I realise that I still need to fill the pot with water. The light is dim and the ladder feels like it will fall apart at any moment. I climb down to the kitchen sink and discover all the water is frozen into ice cubes. Painstakingly, I make numerous trips up and down the rickety ladder, depositing handfuls of ice into the coffee pot. Before I finish, the apartment fills up with people. They're trying to clean the living room. One old guy is struggling with a vacuum cleaner. Apparently, the makeshift electrical outlet into which he has it plugged is shorting out. He looks at me with an angry face and tells me it is because of the coffee pot and what I am doing to it. I feel guilty about this, then plug in the coffee pot anyway. The vacuum cleaner sputters then stops. Still, I don't believe it's my fault.
I am listening to Televison: Marquee Moon